# Single-Stage Semantic Segmentation from Image Labels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.08104 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08104/

## Key facts

- Cited by 167 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 167)

- [SCLIP: Rethinking Self-Attention for Dense Vision-Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01597/) (2023)
- [Multi-class Token Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02891/) (2022)
- [Learning to Generate Text-grounded Mask for Open-world Semantic Segmentation from Only Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00785/) (2022)
- [Railroad is not a Train: Saliency as Pseudo-pixel Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08965/) (2021)
- [Learning Affinity from Attention: End-to-End Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02664/) (2022)
- [CLIP is Also an Efficient Segmenter: A Text-Driven Approach for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09506/) (2022)
- [FeatUp: A Model-Agnostic Framework for Features at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10516/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Auxiliary Tasks with Affinity Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11787/) (2021)
- [Pay Attention to Your Neighbours: Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08181/) (2024)
- [Complementary Patch for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03852/) (2021)
- [CLIP as RNN: Segment Countless Visual Concepts without Training Endeavor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07661/) (2023)
- [Reducing Information Bottleneck for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06530/) (2021)
- [Token Contrast for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01267/) (2023)
- [Regional Semantic Contrast and Aggregation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09653/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09316/) (2023)
- [L2G: A Simple Local-to-Global Knowledge Transfer Framework for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03206/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation with Self-supervised Object-centric Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05027/) (2022)
- [Segment Anything Model (SAM) Enhanced Pseudo Labels for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05803/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Label-efficient Deep Image Segmentation: Bridging the Gap between Weak Supervision and Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01223/) (2022)
- [Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Segmentation with Offline Diffusion-Augmented Prototype Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06542/) (2024)
- [Talking to DINO: Bridging Self-Supervised Vision Backbones with Language for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19331/) (2024)
- [Universal Weakly Supervised Segmentation by Pixel-to-Segment Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00957/) (2021)
- [EmerDiff: Emerging Pixel-level Semantic Knowledge in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11739/) (2024)
- [Max Pooling with Vision Transformers reconciles class and shape in weakly supervised semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17400/) (2022)
- [Incremental Learning in Semantic Segmentation from Image Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01882/) (2021)
- [CLIP-DIY: CLIP Dense Inference Yields Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation For-Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14289/) (2023)
- [Harnessing Vision Foundation Models for High-Performance, Training-Free Open Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09219/) (2024)
- [Threshold Matters in WSSS: Manipulating the Activation for the Robust and Accurate Segmentation Model Against Thresholds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16045/) (2022)
- [Referring Image Segmentation Using Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14575/) (2023)
- [Foundation Model Assisted Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03585/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent years have seen a rapid growth in new approaches improving the accuracy of semantic segmentation in a weakly supervised setting, i.e. with only image-level labels available for training. However, this has come at the cost of increased model complexity and sophisticated multi-stage training procedures. This is in contrast to earlier work that used only a single stage - training one segmentation network on image labels - which was abandoned due to inferior segmentation accuracy. In this work, we first define three desirable properties of a weakly supervised method: local consistency, semantic fidelity, and completeness. Using these properties as guidelines, we then develop a segmentation-based network model and a self-supervised training scheme to train for semantic masks from image-level annotations in a single stage. We show that despite its simplicity, our method achieves results that are competitive with significantly more complex pipelines, substantially outperforming earlier single-stage methods.